Document RH 61/v.96 (German War Planning 1893–1914) gives us the first real insight into the war planning of Schlieffen from 1904 to 1906 and the younger Moltke from 1906 to 1914. It may well give us the only information that we will ever possess concerning German war planning immediately prior to the Great War.
Both the German official history and the ‘Schlieffen School’ (Kuhl, Groener, Boetticher, Zoellner, et al.) maintained that the Schlieffen plan was the German war plan from 1906 to 1914. RH 61/v.96 shows that this was wrong. For example, in 1912/13 the sole German plan was the Grosser Ostaufmarsch, not the Schlieffen plan. RH 61/v.96 also confirms that the 1914/15 plan had practically nothing in common with the Schlieffen plan.
From 1898 until 1913 the German national policy was to build a High Seas Fleet second only to the British Royal Fleet, obtain colonies and establish a say in world affairs. This led to an Anglo-German battleship-building race, which soon became an international naval arms race. The navy consumed Germany’s disposable defence spending.
The mission of the German army during this period was to preserve the European military balance of power and status quo. Initially, the German force structure was adequate for that purpose. There was no strategic reason to increase the size of the German army and no financial resources available in any case. Therefore, the Germans were not going to launch a continental war. The proof of this proposition can be seen in German policy in 1904 and 1905, while Russia was involved in the Manchurian War with Japan. The Germans did not use this opportunity to attack either the Russians or the French, but rather to expand German international influence by asserting their rights in Morocco. Neither did the Germans use the Moroccan crisis as a pretext for a war against France.
The deterioration of the German military position between 1906 and 1914 is reflected in the German intelligence estimates and war plans. The odds against Germany became steadily worse. The number of enemies increased, those enemies became stronger, while the number of friends became fewer and the principal friend, Austria, weaker.
The Anglo-French Entente added six British divisions to the number the German army would have to face. Moreover, it was uncertain where these divisions would appear: the North Sea coast, Antwerp and northern France were equally possible. From 1906 to 1914 IX Reserve Corps would initially be deployed in coast defence in north Germany. The Anglo-French Entente also subtracted Italy from the list of Germany’s possible allies. Italy was terrified of the damage that the British navy could wreak on her coastline, colonies, navy and trade. This meant that the Italian army would not be available to defend Alsace.
In 1915 the Italians began the war that they really wanted to fight – against Austria.
The Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 set in motion a chain of events that would involve Austria in a war with Serbia and Germany in a war with Russia. The German intelligence estimates recognised that the Austrians were faced with at least a two-front war, but the German war planners were unable to do anything about it. German foreign policy had attached Germany to Austria.
By 1912 the Germans acknowledged that they had lost the naval arms race with Britain, which was an advantage for the army. Spurred by the Balkan and Moroccan crises of 1911–13, the German Reichstag approved increases in the army budget in 1911 and 1912, which did little more than allow holes in the existing force structure to be filled in, such as the creation of MG companies. The defence bill of 1913 increased the German army by 58,500 men in October 1913 (and 58,500 in October 1914). This was too little, too late.
The Russian economy was booming. In June 1914 the Russian ‘Great Programme’ was approved, which would have increased the Russian standing army by 400,000 men (25 per cent) by 1917, making it twice as strong as the German 1914 army. More important, only two new corps would be created (about 60,000 men). The rest of these troops would bring the peacetime strength of the Russian army to wartime levels, obviating the need for mobilisation and increasing the speed of deployment. The French 1913 Three Years’ Law kept three conscript classes under the colours instead of two. Again, the increased manpower went towards building up the existing active army units, not in creating new ones. This would speed French mobilisation and deployment appreciably.
The Austrian strategic position had deteriorated alarmingly. Due to the Balkan wars, Turkey was no longer a stabilising factor in the Balkans; Austria had to face the prospect of a two-front war against Russia and Serbia, and had changed its war plan correspondingly. Unfortunately, Colonel Redl betrayed this plan to the Russians.
The Russian deployment became steadily faster. From 1911 to 1914 the Russians and the French were both shifting from a defensive to an offensive strategy. By 1914 the Germans were faced with the certainty of a two-front war and on both fronts the German army would be seriously outnumbered. There were indicators that the French and Russians would launch near-simultaneous offensives. When the French attacked into Lorraine on the fifteenth day of mobilisation, the Germans were not surprised. Neither are there any indications that the Germans were surprised by the Russian attack into East Prussia on the fifteenth day of mobilisation: German intelligence estimates had been warning since 1911 that the Russians had speeded up their mobilisation and deployment. Assertions that the Germans did not expect the Russians to attack until weeks later have no basis in pre-war German planning or intelligence estimates. Given Austrian and German weakness in the east, a crisis on that front was predictable. The only benefit the Germans had to balance the odds was superior tactical doctrine and training.
The German concept was to use their interior position to mass against one enemy, and then use their tactical superiority to defeat him. This would allow the Germans to once again use their interior position and rail mobility to mass against a second enemy, and so on. As Schlieffen noted, the Germans could not repeat this procedure indefinitely; Germany needed decisive victories. These were most likely in the east.
The Russians and the French understood the German strategic situation fully. Their intent was to prevent the Germans from utilising their interior position by attacking simultaneously, before the Germans could attack. In the case of tactical defeat, both the French and the Russians would retreat into the interior of their countries, giving their ally time to attack the outnumbered Germans and draw them away from their railheads. There would be no strategic surprises on either side.
Had war not broken out in 1914, the European military arms race would have continued with increased intensity. The Three Years’ Law was the last gasp for the French army; no further French manpower increases were possible. In fact, there was significant opposition to the Three Years’ Law and the German 1914 intelligence estimate speculated that the French might not be able to maintain it. The Russian Great Programme would have increased the size of their peacetime army and its deployment speed.
The Austro-Germans had lost the arms race to this point, but there was every indication that they recognised the danger of their position, and the Austro-Germans had plenty of room for improvement. Between mid-August and mid-October 1914 the Germans had enough untrained manpower to easily raise six new reserve corps (about 180,000 men). What the Germans lacked was the time and cadres to train them adequately. If the Germans were given the opportunity in peacetime to add just six more trained corps to their order of battle – and the passing of the Russian Great Programme in June 1914 would surely have forced the Germans to do so (even the German socialists hated and feared the Tsarist government) – then the strategic situation would have been radically altered. The addition of even six corps (twelve divisions) would have fundamentally changed the German strategic calculus, which in 1914 was based on the fact that the Germans would be outnumbered on both fronts. The Germans would have been able to deploy eighty divisions in the west against some sixty-three French. The French would not have been able to convince themselves – as they did in 1914 – that they at least had numerical parity and that it was practical to launch an offensive.
The French might have been forced to adopt a strategic defensive outright; if the French had attacked, there was a good chance it would be a spectacular failure. A German attack would have had a far greater chance of quick success. Under these circumstances, the Russians would have been far from enthusiastic for an attack on East Prussia. Six more German corps would have derailed the Franco-Russian plan for simultaneous attacks on Germany. The Germans would have gained the strategic initiative. Due to Germany’s interior position and rail net, they would have been free to mass on one front or the other, at the time and place of their own choosing. Giving the German army the initiative was the recipe for a Franco-Russian catastrophe.
The strategic situation in 1914 was optimal for the Entente. The German strategic position was nearing a ‘worst possible case’ scenario. It was very much in the Franco-Russian interest to fight in 1914, when Germany was still faced with the prospect of being outnumbered on both fronts. In the near future that might no longer have been true.
In midsummer 1904 it appeared to German intelligence that the Manchurian War would cause the French to assume a defensive posture and extend their left flank further north (which was erroneous). Therefore, the German 1905/06 Aufmarsch I extended the right flank as far as the Dutch border.
The only major innovation in Schlieffen’s 1906/07 actual planning was his recognition that the British would probably send troops to assist the French. There is no evidence of a radically different Schlieffen plan in the 1906/07 Aufmarschanweisung.
Based on the Schlieffen plan dogma, it is ‘common knowledge’ that Schlieffen had an offensive war plan. This assertion is not supported by Schlieffen’s actual war plans or war games. Schlieffen held two Generalstabsreisen West in 1904 and one in 1905; in all three exercises the French were attacking. In his 1905 Kriegsspiel, his last and greatest exercise, both the French and the Russians were attacking. In all four exercises the initial battles took place in German or Belgian territory. There is no evidence that Schlieffen ever played an outright offensive into France or Russia. In all of Schlieffen’s exercises the Germans counter-attacked against French and Russian offensives. This would be very curious if, as ‘common knowledge’ maintains, Schlieffen had spent fifteen years perfecting the Schlieffen plan for an offensive against France.
In the 1905/06 Aufmarsch I, for a war against France alone the Germans could deploy seventy-two divisions against an estimated fifty-five French. This would seem to be a great enough numerical superiority for the Germans to have launched a preventive war against France. The Germans did nothing of the kind.
If Germans in general, and Schlieffen in particular, were congenital aggressors, and the Russians were completely defenceless in the west due to their war in Manchuria, as ‘common knowledge’ and the German war guilt school maintains, it follows that the Germans should have launched a preventive war in the east (as the elder Moltke had wanted to do in 1887). This was so far from German intentions that, though Schlieffen had an Ostaufmarsch II in 1900/01 and 1901/02 with forty-four divisions in the east, he did not even have a plan for an Ostaufmarsch against Russia in 1905/06 and 1906/07. Instead, Schlieffen once again in 1905 played both an operational study and a war game with the scenario of a Russian attack into East Prussia.
The remarkable thing about the Schlieffen plan was that Schlieffen maintained that in a one-front war against France alone the Germans needed ninety-six divisions – twenty-four divisions that they did not have – and even this might not be enough. Even if Schlieffen wanted to conduct a war of aggression against France, the Schlieffen plan was an open admission that he was one-third short of the force he needed to do so.
In 1907/08 to 1908/09 Moltke only tinkered with Schlieffen’s real planning. Moltke’s 1906 and 1908 Generalstabsreisen West are firmly in line with Schlieffen’s actual planning and exercises. Nothing during this period shows any influence of the ‘Schlieffen plan’. Moltke’s major innovation was the inclusion in the 1908/09 plan of the requirement to take Liège ‘quickly’.
The crisis from October 1908 to March 1909, caused by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, resulted in major changes in Moltke’s war planning. Germany was faced with the possibility that the war would start in the east or the west, either of which could immediately develop into a two-front war which Britain would join. In 1909/10 there was now an Aufmarsch I for a war in which all seventy-four divisions deployed against France, and an Aufmarsch Ia in which sixty-four divisions deployed in the west and ten in the east. Moltke revived Schlieffen’s Grosser Ostaufmarsch with forty-two divisions deploying in the east. The 1910/11 and 1911/12 deployment plans were essentially the same.
Moltke’s Ostaufmarsch puts paid to all manner of myths concerning German war planning. It is now clear that the Schlieffen plan was not the single perfect war plan: Moltke massively modified German planning to conform to the changing political situation. In addition, it has been ‘common knowledge’ that the elder Moltke originated the Ostaufmarsch, and the fact that the younger Moltke cancelled it is proof that the younger Moltke wanted to launch an aggressive war in the west. In fact, the elder Moltke, Schlieffen and the younger Moltke all adopted and then rejected the Ostaufmarsch for reasons unrelated to an aggressive war in the west.
Beginning in 1910, the Austro-German position in the east deteriorated. The Russian army was rapidly improving. The 1910/11 plan stated that in case of Aufmarsch I, the thirteen divisions in East Prussia might not be able to defend the province. On the other hand, although the German army had risen to seventy-nine divisions by forming new reserve divisions, the Austrian army stagnated.
The second Moroccan crisis lasted from June to November 1911. That year, the French and Russians agreed to conduct a joint offensive against Germany on the sixteenth day of mobilisation. While the Germans had no direct knowledge of this, the German 1911 west front intelligence estimate said that the Russian army had completely recovered, that the British would support the French and, in consequence, French confidence had increased dramatically. The 1911/12 German war plan said that it might be necessary to fortify Berlin. It was suspected that in a crisis the Russians would conduct a secret mobilisation in order to speed up their deployment.
The German 1912 intelligence estimates continued to show deterioration in the German strategic situation. Russian industry was booming and their military capabilities were improving. The French were beginning to switch from a defensive-offensive doctrine to one of outright offence. A ‘new school’ of French officers expected the Germans to attack through Belgium.
This intelligence estimate was still in force in August 1914. It is clear that the Germans did not expect a quick, decisive victory in the west. The French were prepared to retreat far into their interior, drawing the Germans after them and giving the Russians the opportunity to overwhelm the Germans in the east.
The First Balkan War Crisis lasted throughout the winter of 1912/13. The Germans decided that the Russians were secretly mobilising. The German war plan was again hastily revised to provide for a war that began in the east, with France at least initially being neutral. There was no concept of the operation in the east, probably because the Russian mobilisation was already far advanced. In the west, the Germans would deploy from their mobilisation stations to counter-attack against the French offensive. According to the ‘Schlieffen plan’ dogma, the Germans should have responded to any crisis by preparing to conduct an aggressive war against France. That was obviously not the case. In the 1913/14 plan any illusions that Germany might be able to fight a one-front ‘Schlieffen plan’ war were abandoned. In the next war, Germany would have to face France, Russia and Britain.
The Austro-Germans would be outnumbered on both fronts. The Germans expected that sixty-eight German divisions in the west would be opposed by seventy-five French, British and Belgian divisions. The nine German divisions in East Prussia and forty-nine Austrian divisions would be opposed by a hundred Russian and twelve Serbian divisions: in total 128 Austro-German divisions against 187 Entente. While the German divisions may have been of the highest quality, the Austrian divisions were the weakest.
‘The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered’, which set off the Schlieffen plan debate, was published in War in History in the autumn of 1999. Inventing the Schlieffen Plan was published in 2002. It received numerous reviews, including The Times Literary Supplement. The historical section of the German army called an international Schlieffen Plan conference at Potsdam in 2004. Schlieffen’s planning documents were published in German War Planning 1891–1914: Sources and Interpretations. The Schlieffen plan debate continues in War in History and is the subject of about fourteen articles to date.
None of this is reflected in that repository of ‘common knowledge’, Wikipedia. The author of the Schlieffen plan Wikipedia entry recites every Schlieffen plan cliché; indeed, he agrees that ‘this article seems like tired conventional wisdom rather than a reflection of modern scholarship’.1
The article naturally features the West Point Atlas map. According to the Wikipedia author, the Schlieffen plan was written for a two-front war, even though the first line of the original document says ‘War against France’, that is, a one-front war. He seems unaware that Paris was a huge fortress and says that the plan provided for the capture of Paris in thirty-nine days. The French army was to be annihilated near Paris in exactly forty-two days. This was supposedly the length of time the Germans thought it would take the Russians to mobilise their army. He relies on his own imagination and old secondary literature and there is no indication that he has ever even read the Schlieffen plan Denkschrift, much less the rest of the German and French planning documents.
Indeed, ‘common knowledge’ experts on the Schlieffen plan always feel free to embellish the story without the need for evidence. The Wikipedia author says that after the Franco-British Entente was signed in 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm ordered Schlieffen to prepare a plan for a two-front war. One wonders what the Wikipedia author thinks the German war plan had been in the ten years since 1894, when the French and Russians finalised their alliance and a two-front war was a certainty.
Wikipedia is not alone in relying exclusively on ‘common knowledge’ concerning German war planning. Holger Herwig has a long history of repeating the entire Schlieffen plan dogma.2 He wrote in 2002 that the Schlieffen plan depended on a rigid timetable, which would end in complete victory on the forty-second day of mobilisation.3 This drew the attention of Terence Holmes, who said:
He [Herwig] gives his background summary of the Schlieffen plan ‘at the risk of overkill’, implying that the details are so well known and so firmly established that they hardly need to be gone over yet again. What he offers is indeed a familiar and widely accepted reading, but it is nevertheless one that ought to be reexamined rather than simply restated … Of course, if something could become true by dint of mere repetition, then the six-week theory would now be incontrovertible, so often has it been reiterated.4
Holmes easily shows that no such timetable was actually in the Schlieffen plan Denkschrift. The six-week figure was grafted on later, and Holmes notes that where the six-week figure came from at all is murky.
In 1997 Herwig said that the Schlieffen plan provided for ‘a single army’ to be deployed in East Prussia. In 2002 Herwig reduced this to ‘a single corps’. Holmes makes two apposite observations. First, there is a significant difference between a corps and an army. Second:
In the end, though, this is not really an issue. Neither alternative is compatible with the Schlieffen plan of December 1905, which makes no reference whatever to an eastern deployment … the Schlieffen plan not only used the whole of the German field army in the west, it also called for a considerable expansion of that force to make it strong enough for the task of annihilating the French army. There was no question of having any units left over as spare capacity for deployment in the east.
Holmes notes that the Schlieffen plan was based on Aufmarsch I for a one-front war in the west:
The plan was predicated on a situation when there would be no enemy in the east. It also explains why there was no six-week deadline for completing the western offensive: the speed of the Russian advance was irrelevant to a plan devised for a war scenario excluding Russia.
Herwig introduced his 2009 book, The Marne 1914, by trumpeting that ‘a massive research effort’ would allow him to take a ‘fresh and revealing look at the Marne’.5 That fresh look did not extend to the Schlieffen plan. Herwig repeats the Schlieffen plan myth in toto:
The Germans gambled all on a brilliant operational concept devised by Chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 and carried out (in revised form) by his successor, Helmuth von Moltke, in 1914: a lightning forty-day wheel through Belgium and northern France ending in a victorious entry march into Paris, followed by a redeployment of German armies to the east to halt the Russian steamroller. It was a single roll of the dice.6
Herwig is now back to ‘a single army … would hold off the Russians’ in East Prussia.7 He still uses the West Point Atlas Schlieffen plan map. Herwig does not cite any source to support this assertion, which, like the Wikipedia article, is based on ‘common knowledge’ and not the Schlieffen plan Denkschrift or Moltke’s plans and orders.
Herwig has ignored Holmes’ arguments completely: Holmes isn’t mentioned in Herwig’s footnotes or bibliography, not even Holmes’ two ‘Schlieffen Plan’ debate articles in War in History. (Full disclosure: Herwig gives Inventing the Schlieffen Plan one line, so that he can summarily dismiss it.) Herwig has changed nothing from his 1997 and 2002 descriptions of the Schlieffen plan; even the verbiage is repeated (‘a single roll of the dice’). Herwig’s manner of proving his case – simply ignoring the opposition – would not be permitted in a high school debate tournament.
Herwig has good reason to ignore Holmes. Holmes’ case is airtight. Herwig is on record for over a decade as having presented a demonstrably and fundamentally erroneous description of German war planning.
Prior to 1999 it was ‘common knowledge’ to simultaneously maintain that the Schlieffen plan was the German war plan while being mildly puzzled by the numerous glaring inconsistencies this proposition entailed. But, as Herwig himself notes, the fall of the Wall made a mass of new documentation available, which forces serious historians to conduct a fundamental reappraisal of German war planning. This new documentation was not presented by Herwig, who relies solely on outdated ‘common knowledge’, but is in Inventing the Schlieffen Plan.
It is also ‘common knowledge’ that the Germans had an aggressive war plan, which proves German guilt for starting the First World War. This ‘common knowledge’ is directly contradicted by both the French and Russian war plans, which provided for a co-ordinated offensive against Germany, and by the fact that it was the French and Russians that attacked first. The first battles, at Stallupönen and Tannenberg in East Prussia and in Alsace and Lorraine in the west, were all fought on German territory. If aggressive war planning and conducting the first attack are proof of war guilt, then it was the French and Russians who were guilty, not the Germans. In fact, the Russians and the French attacked because it was militarily advantageous to do so; the Germans defended on interior lines because it was militarily advantageous for them to do so. Neither strategy is intrinsically ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’.
The decision to go to war is political. Whether international politics are moral or immoral – indeed, whether the idea of ‘war guilt’ makes any political or ethical sense at all – is not a problem for military history.
Alternatively, the German war guilt school maintains that the Germans recognised the deterioration of their military position and launched an aggressive war while they still had a chance of winning. The most recent representative of this school is Mark Hewitson’s Germany and the Causes of the First World War.8 Hewitson’s knowledge of German war planning goes no further than a firm conviction that there was an aggressive Schlieffen plan, the features of which were ‘common knowledge’ which did not require further explanation. He notes that the Germans knew they would be outnumbered. Nevertheless, he is convinced that the only way the Germans thought they could win a decisive victory was by a Schlieffen plan attack into France. He does not consult the actual German war plans; instead, Hewitson cites secondary literature, some of it quite old. I maintain that there never was a Schlieffen plan, which Hewitson somehow transforms into an assertion that ‘there never was a single Schlieffen plan’, whatever that means (multiple Schlieffen plans?).9
Hewitson thinks that the Germans had offensive tactics, which proves that they alone had an offensive strategy. Hewitson is evidently unaware that ‘the cult of the offensive’ in all pre-Great War European armies is an old and established theme of military history. He has apparently never heard of the French offensive à outrance.10
Hewitson does not address French and Russian strategy. Neither does he consider the actual conduct of the first month of the war. For Hewitson and the rest of the German war guilt school it’s much better not to look at the military details. In fact, the Russians mobilised first, which started the clock ticking on the Russo-French co-ordinated attack, which would begin on the fifteenth day of mobilisation. There was no such timetable in the German war plan – ever. If there was, as A.J.P. Taylor thought, a ‘War by Timetable’, then that timetable was Franco-Russian.
If the Germans had an aggressive war plan, they did not get an opportunity to use it. The initial battles of the war were fought on German territory, with the French and Russians attacking and the Germans counter-attacking. By Hewitson’s own strategic, political, tactical and moral standards, the French and Russians were blatant aggressors.
I contend that the 1906 Schlieffen plan Denkschrift required ninety-six divisions in a one-front war, but that only seventy-two were available in 1905, 1906 or 1907 – years in which the various fanciers of the Schlieffen plan have said it was implemented as the real German war plan.11 The Schlieffen plan was short by one active, seven reserve divisions and sixteen ersatz divisions, a total of twenty-four divisions, which I call ‘ghost divisions’. Indeed, ten of these ersatz divisions never existed. In 1914 the Germans were initially able to deploy sixty-eight divisions in the west, twelve short of the eighty required, and six ersatz divisions, ten short of the sixteen required. In 1914 the Germans were twenty-two divisions short of a Schlieffen plan-sized army.12
Some advocates of the Schlieffen plan, such as Herwig and Hewitson, simply refuse to address the problem, even though the Reichsarchiv said in 1925 that the need to raise the additional forces was an integral part of the plan.
Terence Holmes said:
Schlieffen took the question of numbers very seriously because it was inseparable from his war planning. I will try to examine this question just as seriously … Anyone who finds this sort of thing tedious beyond words can skip the following discussion and refrain from taking a view of the Schlieffen plan.13
Holmes easily disposes of the opinions of Gross, Robert Foley and Annika Mombauer concerning the Schlieffen plan’s missing divisions. He gives no credence to Gross’ argument that, because Schlieffen allegedly used an unspecified number of non-existent heavy artillery batteries in 1893/94, it is perfectly plausible that he wrote twenty-four non-existent divisions into the Schlieffen plan. Neither does Holmes find Foley’s argument that Schlieffen planned to use extra active army units to create the ersatz divisions very helpful. Foley, Holmes says, is mixing apples and oranges: active army and ersatz units were two different things. ‘Mombauer offers no opinion on the subject of troop numbers in the Schlieffen plan, perhaps because it belongs to what she rather disdainfully calls the “minutiae” of the debate between Zuber and me.’14 I agree wholeheartedly.15
For diametrically different purposes both the Schlieffen School and Gerhard Ritter contended that the January–February 1906 Schlieffen plan Denkschrift provided Germany with the ‘perfect plan’. The discovery of the RH 61/v.96 summary of the German deployment plans from 1893 to 1914 puts the final nails in the coffin of the Schlieffen plan dogma. It is now evident that after 1906, the Schlieffen plan Aufmarsch I was only one of several possible plans, one being for a far more probable two-front war. From 1909/10 to 1912/13 there were multiple plans, including the Ostaufmarsch. Far from being the ‘perfect plan’, the plan that survived to 1914 was not the one-front Schlieffen plan but the two-front Aufmarsch I West und Ost.
The central theme of German war planning from 1891 onwards was that the Germans would have to fight a two-front war and that in this war they would be seriously outnumbered. It is evident from Schlieffen’s war plans and war games that an offensive into France was infeasible: the French army was just as strong (or stronger) as the German forces in the west, the French border fortifications were too formidable and even if the French were defeated, they could withdraw into the interior of the country. An all-out offensive on one front would not be decisive and would only ensure a quick crisis on the other front. Schlieffen’s solution to the two-front war problem was to use Germany’s interior position and rail mobility as force multipliers to counter-attack against the Franco-Russian offensive.
In 1914 the Russians mobilised first and the French and Russians attacked into Germany. They were defeated by German counter-attacks. In the east, Tannenberg was everything Schlieffen could have asked for – indeed, it was a replay of Schlieffen’s 1894 Generalstabsreise Ost. In the west, Moltke could not impose a unified strategy on the army chiefs of staff (Kuhl, for one, was completely out of control). They were, in Schlieffen’s words, content to conduct frontal attacks and win ‘ordinary victories’. As Schlieffen had foreseen, the defeated French were able to withdraw into the interior of the country. The only real prospect for German victory at this point would have been the transfer of at least seven corps from the west to the east. This was the strategy in all of Schlieffen’s Generalstabsreisen Ost. Had Moltke done so, it is hard to imagine how the Russian forces in East Prussia could have escaped total destruction. Instead, Moltke pursued the French, a course of action Schlieffen never recommended. Moltke had no firm concept of the operation: from 27 August to 5 September he would issue three fundamentally different operations orders. As Schlieffen had foretold, on 5 September, even before the French Marne offensive, the German advance had ground to a halt. The result was stalemate. Schlieffen had warned that a long war would be ruinous for European civilisation. The old master strategist was right for one last time.
Notes
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan, 20 October 2010.
2 Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London, 1997), pp. 46–50.
3 Holger Herwig, ‘Germany and the “Short War” Illusion: Toward a New Interpretation?’ in Journal of Military History 66 (July 2002), pp. 681–93.
4 Terence Holmes, ‘“One Throw of the Gambler’s Dice”: A Comment on Holger Herwig’s View of the Schlieffen Plan’ in War in History 67 (April 2003), pp. 513–6.
5 Holger Herwig, The Marne 1914 (New York, 2009), p. xiv.
6 Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.
7 Ibid., p. 36.
8 Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004).
9 Ibid., p. 124.
10 Ibid., pp. 124–5.
11 It must be noted that at no point in the 1906 Schlieffen plan Denkschrift is there a concise summary of the force required. Coming up with this total involves some complicated searching. The usual Schlieffen plan force structure is given as twenty-six active corps (fifty-two divisions), fourteen reserve corps (twenty-eight divisions, a total of eighty active and reserve divisions) and eight ersatz corps (sixteen divisions), for a grand total of forty-eight corps (ninety-six divisions).
12 IX Reserve Corps was sent west from coastal defence duty in Schleswig-Holstein to blockade Antwerp, while the Guard Reserve Corps (2nd Army) and XI Corps (3rd Army) were sent to East Prussia.
13 Terence Holmes, ‘All Present and Correct: The Verifiable Army of the Schlieffen Plan’ in War in History (2009), 16 (1), pp. 98–115.
14 Ibid., pp. 99–101.
15 As Terence Holmes has pointed out, Annika Mombauer hates attention to military detail, and with good reason. I said (in German) that German intelligence had been made aware by an agent report of the secret Anglo-French military conversations. Mombauer, who speaks fluent German, interpreted this to mean that ‘the German Secret Service (!) had decided to take Liège’, by which I assume she means that German spies were going to capture the fortress (Mombauer, ‘German War Plans’ in War Planning 1914, R. Hamilton and H. Herwig (eds), p. 61). The problem is not Mombauer’s German, but the fact that she knows nothing about intelligence operations. She translates ‘Joffre’s plan de renseignements’, which means ‘intelligence collection plan’, as ‘the so-called [?] Plan XVII’; that is, the operations plan (p. 69). She says, ‘according to Zuber, it was not the Germans who had the offensive war plan, but the Franco-Russian alliance’ (p. 62). Presumably she does not believe this to be true. In the same book, Bruce Menning (p. 127) says that the Russians had an offensive war plan and Robert Doughty (p. 157) that the French did too, that they executed these plans, and that the first battles were fought on German territory. That would seem to me to constitute offensive French and Russian war plans. The problem is that for Mombauer German aggression is an article of faith, and any other conclusion is literally unthinkable.